They also reflect the profoundly dysfunctional way the Affordable Care Act came to be law, in which Democratic legislators, urged by the White House to get healthcare reform passed well before the 2010 elections, slammed it through without the normal process of conferences and cleaning up as the House and Senate decide upon the final language they will present for the President's signature.

One thing that isn't in doubt, according to a Republican staff attorney who was present at the creation, is whether Congress wanted health-insurance subsidies to flow through federal exchanges.

"Congress always intended for the federal exchanges to do everything the state exchanges do, one of those things being the federal subsidy," said Chris Condeluci, an employment lawyer with Venable in Washington who was tax counsel to the Senate Finance Committee from 2007 to 2010. "I can say, even as a Republican, Congress always intended this, we just didn’t indicate it through legislative history because the process was so screwed up."

Yale Law School Professor Abbe Gluck does an excellent job of explaining how the process was screwed up in this post from last December. After Sen. Ted Kennedy died and was replaced by Republican Scott Brown, the Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority and fell back on the blunt tool of reconciliation to smash together the House and Senate versions of the healthcare bill. That left "a very badly drafted statute," in Gluck's estimation, with three Section 1563s and the seemingly ironclad instruction to the Internal Revenue Service that it can only issue healthcare subsidies to people who buy insurance on state-operated exchanges.

For Condeluci, however, the lesson of Obamacare is simpler than that. The reason judges are fighting over what the law means is because in the case of healthcare reform, the lawmaking process broke down entirely. What began as a joint effort between Republicans and Democrats fell apart in the summer of 2009 as Tea Party activists staged theatrical protests against the emerging law and the White House reacted by instructing Sen. Max Baucus to shut Republicans out of the negotiations because they'd never vote for it anyway, Condeluci told me.

The fight over whether Obamacare provides for subsidies "really isn’t political," he said. "It isn’t `Hey, the government is spending too much.' It should be, `This is what dysfunctional legislating leads to, when you have one party cutting out another party and taking advantage of an obscure rule to get a bill through.'"

Baucus and Rep. Sen Charles Grassley of Iowa had a long relationship and initially worked closely together on what would become the ACA, Condeluci said. The two senators, later expanded to a "Gang of Six" including Republicans Mike Enzi of Wyoming and Maine's Olympia Snowe, agreed on about 80% of the reform measures and disagreements were mostly limited to politically intractable issues like abortion coverage, he said.

Republicans even agreed on the much-derided minimum standards for health benefits, Condeluci said, because they thought that would prevent an outbreak of rentseeking at the state level as providers lobbied for enhanced mandatory benefits. Under the law, states that enacted higher minimum benefits would have to pay the subsidized cost of them with their own tax revenue, he said.

The individual and employer mandate penalties were decided in an arbitrary and highly political manner, he added. The negotiators knew the insurance mandate had to be tough to draw in healthy policyholders, otherwise the market would collapse under a wave of adverse selection as only the sick and elderly bought insurance. But Obama had run explicitly against such mandates and small-business lobbyists argued that high employer penalties would drive them out of business. Meanwhile the Congressional Budget Office was hovering over the negotiations, calculating the expected level of compliance depending upon the level of the penalties.

Ultimately Obamacare became law with a nearly trivial individual penalty and a $2,000-per-employee penalty for companies that don't provide insurance. The numbers allowed the CBO to predict Obamacare wouldn't bust the federal budget but were low enough to avoid political blowback, Condeluci said.

There was never much disagreement on premium subsidies. The Republicans agreed they were necessary to induce the working poor to buy insurance but wanted them to top out at 300% of the poverty level, while Democrats held out for 400%.

After the town-hall meetings and Tea Party circus in the summer of 2009, he said, the White House instructed Baucus to give up on negotiating with the Republicans and mark up a partisan bill instead. Then Kennedy died on Aug. 25 and panicked Democrats turned to the reconciliation process to save the law. Condeluci was among a dozen Republican staffers who visited the Senate parliamentarian daily to argue reconciliation violated Senate rules. They failed, but by bypassing the normal conference process the Democrats doomed the law to endless fights over what it means.

As Gluck of Yale Law School describes it, "everyone who follows Congress knows that the Conference stage is the most important stage of the legislative process." It's where the law is edited to remove obvious errors and the House and Senate negotiate the finer points of disagreement. Perhaps more importantly, it's where the record of what Congress was thinking -- if such a concept has any real meaning at all -- is developed.